Labour beats the Tories – on Twitter…

Labour are hammering the Conservatives on Twitter, if nowhere else… eConsultancy measured how many followers each of the main political parties have and Labour is streets ahead.

Combining the official profile with number of followers belonging to MPs from each party, Labour has 113,201 followers, more than both the Conservatives (36,874) and Lib Dems (32,202).

A higher proportion of Labour MPs and politicians tweet than in the Conservative party, which is what tips the balance in Labour’s favour, but the Conservative official account is more popular than Labour’s official account. The Tories currently have 18,547 followers compared to Labour’s 3,451. It’s pretty noticeable that the Conservatives are following a lot of people back (18,092) but that Labour are following precisely no-one. Apparently they’re changing tack on their official account and using it more to engage and less to broadcast.

Another factor could be that the Twitterati are often accused of having a left-bias – seen for example in how outraged British Tweeters got about the Daily Mail article by Jan Moir about Stephen Gately’s death – and the respective popularity of the parties could reflect the fact that more Twitterers are Labour voters.